Muhammad Yunis had a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt. He devotes his life to provide financial and social services to the most poor of Bangladesh. He founded the Grameen Bank. He and Grameen won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

See “The Price of a Dream: The Stoy of the Grameen Bank” by Daniel Bornstein (book 207) for an excellent story of what led him to his life’s work, with many details of their early-year learning curve. The concept of microfinance began in Yunis’ mind while teaching economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. At many places in the world, microfinance banks patterned after Yunis’ Grameen Bank have been established and are successful. But the purpose of this book by Muhammad Yunis is to introduce, explain and initiate his new concept of a “multinational social business.” It has three parts. Part I is The Promise of Social Business. Part II is The Grameen Experiment. Part III is A World Without Poverty. The Epilogue is Poverty Is a Threat to Peace – his Nobel Prize Lecture.

So what is a “social business?” Ch 2 – Social Business: What It Is and What It Is Not – provides his detailed answer to this question. First it is not a PMB (profit-maximizing business) because it has different objectives than does a PMB. Second it is still somewhat of a developing concept. As did the Grameen Bank (or micro-credit or micro-finance in general), it has to evolve into its most efficient way to accomplish its non-profit objectives. The best way to describe a “multinational social business” is to use the example Yunis used in his Prologue. He had lunch with Franck Riboud, the chairman and CEO of Groupe Danone, a large French corporation (whose American brand name is Dannon) and several of Franck’s colleagues, each an expert in some aspect of Danone’s global business. After exchanging information about their businesses, Yunis proposed the creation of a joint venture to bring some of the nutritious foods Danone makes to the villages of Bangladesh. He suggested they name the company Grameen Danone. The goal was to manufacture as cheaply as possible healthful foods to improve the diet of rural Bangladeshis. As the Prologue concludes, “Not only were Franck Riboud and Danone committed to the project, they wanted to move ahead at a rapid pace to make our new business into a reality. I discovered this during the whirlwind of the next several months, as Groupe Danone and Grameen worked together to create something new under the sun: the world’s very first consciously designed social business.”

The key element of why this new non-PMB business was that all profits were reinvested into improving the business, expanding it to cover more villages, and reducing the cost of their first food – fortified yogurt. Reinvesting all profits was not a short-term plan but a permanent one. As a social business, the Grameen Danone company would never return dividends to investors, unlike a PMB. The investors, Danone and Grameen in this example, knew this at the very beginning – the purpose of their very existence was to help the poor villagers of Bangladesh in two ways – by providing low-cost nutritious food to these poor people and to employ them in this business as much as possible. But this was a business, not a charity that depended on regular donations. This multinational social business had to balance their various costs with income from their produce, with no donors involved. So Muhammed Yunis discussed an idea he had been thinking about at a lunch in France with a profitable company that was willing to embark with Grameen on this new concept of a social business. This book tells about this and other social businesses – Muhammad Yunis’ second great economic idea has not yet matured as has his first great idea of microfinance. He wrote this book to spread the word about social businesses. As he says in Part III – A World Without Poverty – he believes social businesses will play a crucial role in making such a reality of a world without poverty. This inspiring gift book has my very highest recommendation. (Think six stars.)